Lab 8

                                                        A tour of Monterey
Objective: Learn how to produce mushroom in industrial.

Information about Monterey Mushrooms Company:

Monterey Mushrooms, Inc. was established in 1971 as a family- owned and operated farm in Royal Oaks, California. Today, Monterey is vertically integrated and able to control all aspects of mushroom production from seed to customer/consumer. An international, multi-facility company, with 10 mushroom growing farms strategically located throughout North America – Monterey’s mushrooms are literally “locally grown” nationwide. This means that Monterey is uniquely positioned to deliver the best, most innovative mushroom products possible to consumers throughout the country.
Monterey is the country’s largest and only national marketer of fresh mushrooms, supplying unique, innovative and high quality products for sale to supermarkets, foodservice and ingredient manufacture operations, and for preparation of processed, canned, and frozen mushroom products. Headquartered in Watsonville, California, Monterey has production, sales and administrative offices, internationally. ----http://www.montereymushrooms.com/about-us/about-monterey-mushrooms/

We arrived Monterey Mushrooms Factory, Mr. Armando, who is the manager and have worked for Monterey Mushrooms more than 20 years,  hosted us and gave us a briefly introdution about the history of this company.

The procedures of Mushrooms produced, as Mr. Armando told us, usually, it takes 51 days to grow the white mushrooms.

                                            The compost they used to grow mushrooms.

                                               The compost were pre-treat out door

 The mix-well compost were heaped into raws, and during the 11 days peroid, they generated heat inside because of some kinds of fermentative reactions

                          The pre-treated compost were sent into  factory, and filled into a specific chamber.

The chamber was under the control of humidity and the concentration of oxygen

                    Now the compost was then filled into the wood tray and ready for mushroom growth

                                      This is the compost which ready for growing mushrooms

Mushroom mycelium were gernimated on Barley and later were uniformly sowed  in the compost

                                                         Baby mushrooms are growing

                       Around 20 days later, the mushrooms are ready to harvest. The worker also separated  the mushrooms base on the size. See, how productive of each tray.

 Beside the white  mushrooms, they also produced this brown color mushrooms. Seems this kinds of mushrooms growth biger than the white one. 

                                            Then, they were sent to the washing room, to wash out the soil.

                                                                       Packege it.

                              Now it is ready to sold. This is what you saw in Walmart, HEB.... Now, we know how they were produced. Amazing!